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Wednesday, 1 April 2015

Books – Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie

Published in 2013,
Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice has
taken the sci-fi world by storm. It won basically every sci-fi prize there is,
from the Hugo Award to the Arthur C. Clarke to the Nebula, and has had
brilliant reviews pretty much all round. And I can see why. It’s a brave and
somewhat brilliant novel. Set thousands of years in the future, in a universe controlled
by the imperial power the Radch, the book is narrated by a soldier known as
Breq. Yet Breq has not always been what she/it seems (more on gender and
pronouns later). Twelve years earlier she was an artificial intelligence
controlling the spaceship Justice of Toren,
and the minds and bodies of all its ancillaries. Now she’s confined to a single
body and interweaved with her present mission, we discover how she became what
she is now.

It’s a fascinating
premise, both in terms of its narrative perspective and the world Leckie
creates. We’re immediately plunged into this world, and I’ll admit I spent the
first fifty pages a little confused. There are a lot of names and races and
classes to get your head around – and seeing a new world through the eyes of a
narrator who is both exceedingly familiar with that world and exceedingly
intelligent, doesn’t necessarily help. However, I soon got very into the story
and setting. The Radch run most of the galaxy, and have been annexing planets
for centuries, although this process has slowed now. The Radch Empire is
presided over by The Lord of Radch, who has cloned her/himself into thousands
of bodies, in order to fully control her/his vast empire. Part of the Radch
system involves the use of ancillaries, soldiers whose once-human bodies have
been cyberneticly enhanced, and who are now controlled by their ship’s AI. It’s
a great set up for a novel, and Leckie carries it off well.

Someone in my book
group described this novel as ‘Jane Austen in space’, which is partly perhaps
why I loved it so much. And no, there is no romance and there are no Mr Darcys
(indeed there are arguably no Misters at all) – but the society we’re pretended
with is a highly stratified one. There’s a lot of social codes and norms to be
abided by or broken. The Radch view themselves as above anyone un-Radch, who
are to them not civilised, not human. Internally the Radch is incredibly
reliant on class and prestige, with particular Houses being seen as above
others. Seivarden Vandaai, one of the central characters, is a snob fit to
rival Lady Catherine de Borough from Pride
and Prejudice. And there’s also a wonderful amount of drinking tea, and the
kind of tea you drink shows your place in society. I love it.

But what really makes
this book for me is the narrative voice. It’s original, bizarre, tricky – and
brilliantly effective. How Leckie manages to actually pull it off is just
beyond me, and yet she does. As I’ve said, the novel is told from the
perspective of an AI who was once in charge of the spaceship Justice of Toren and all is ancillaries.
She’s now confined to a single ancillary form. Yet because of the dual
narrative running throughout we get a sense of the narrator’s perspective and
existence both now in one body and in the past as many. To narrate from the
perspective of one character with multiple separate bodies, who are to an
extent all one being and yet also not – it’s so entirely complicated, but
Leckie does it superbly. The narrative perspective never feels forced or
gimmicky or confusing. It feels natural and understandable – and, let’s be
honest, it’s just really cool.

The other main point
of interest for me is the way Leckie deals with gender. Because the narrator is
an AI, not a human, she has trouble telling genders apart, and so the narrative
refers to everybody without discrimination as ‘she’. Thus, because our narrator
doesn’t know what gender anybody is, nor do we. The reader is forced to become
gender-blind, and the effect is interesting and I think really effective. For
example, we’re told in the first chapter that Seivarden is male, and yet he’s referred to as ‘she’ throughout.
You therefore just can’t stop yourself imagining Seivarden as a woman – which is
perhaps the point. It’s the same with the Lord of the Radch; as a ‘Lord’ she’s
probably male, but I always imagined her as female. This technique works
interestingly in comparison with Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, which I read last month. In The Left Hand of Darkness, the narrator
is an ambassador on a planet in which everybody is of one gender. Le Guin uses the
pronoun ‘he’ for this alien race, which of course means that we as readers
imagine them as male for the most part – as indeed, does the narrator. In Ancillary Justice however, Leckie’s
pronoun usage has the opposite effect. We imagine everyone as female – or,
perhaps, because we know that our narrator can’t tell people’s gender, we start
imagining everyone as genderless. Half way through the book I stopped trying to
figure out who was male and who was female, and it stopped mattering, which is
great – and I think that’s exactly what Leckie was going for.

(A side note:
although I suppose the AI narrator is genderless, I’ve referred to her as ‘she’
throughout this review. This is partly because the novel’s blurb does and I
assume Leckie approved of that, and also because ‘she’ is the default through
the rest of the book.)

Overall Ancillary Justice is a fascinating,
clever and engaging novel. I read it in two days, though it’s a good four
hundred pages. I really love the originality of this book. I don’t think I
fully realised until writing this review just how many fascinating ideas Leckie
is working with here. Beyond the complex narrative voice, the effective
dismantling of gender, the many clones of the Lord of the Radch, and the
tightly stratified society – the book also deals with issues of morality,
personal autonomy, and imperial colonialism. There’s just so much in this
novel, and it’s all brilliant. I’ve just bought the sequel, Ancillary Sword, and I can’t wait to
read the rest of the series.

Greatest
strength: I have a
lot to choose from, but I think what most impressed me was the complex narrative
voice – not only the originality of the idea but the fact that Leckie pulls it
off so well.

Greatest
weakness: I did
find the world and plot a little confusing, especially in the first fifty or so
pages of the novel. It took me a while to have any clear sense of the world we
were in.

Let’s
finish on a quote:‘Good necessitates evil and the two sides of that disk are not always clearly
marked.’

Next week: We’ll be having another guest
review from the delightful Chris King, who’ll be reviewing George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four. I’ll be back the week
after.